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What Happened When I Tried Talking to Twitter Abusers

Trigger warning: please note that this is a blog post about online abuse, and includes screen caps of tweets sent to me. Graphic threats and abusive, hateful language toward women appear therein.

A few weeks ago, I gave a keynote talk at World Domination Summit in Portland. The thesis: while we regard online misogyny and abuse of women as something wholly separate and different from its so-called “real-world” counterparts, these are all components of the same system. We dismiss sexual harassment that happens on the internet in the exact same way that we dismiss sexual harassment that happens face-to-face, even though these experiences are often just as bad – if not worse – for the victim, often due to the mechanics of the anonymity of the internet.

Women – both online and off – are told that we are overreacting, that we brought this abuse upon ourselves, that we can just leave